Sarah Rogers: Free Speech, AI Diplomacy, and What America Owes Its Allies

What It Covers

Sarah B. Rogers, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, outlines how her office reversed a government-funded censorship apparatus, why proliferating a Western AI stack is America's top soft power priority, and how EU digital regulations threaten American free speech norms globally.

Key Questions Answered

• •Western AI Stack as Soft Power: Economist Tyler Cowen's framework of "AI with a Western soul" — reasoning individualistically, prioritizing user consent, operating on rules-based principles — represents the most consequential soft power tool the U.S. possesses. Rogers argues its global proliferation should be a top priority for any government or founder who values freedom.
• •EU Regulatory Contagion Risk: European digital safety laws imposing fines up to 6% of global revenue on platforms are becoming templates for U.S. lobbying groups. Rogers identifies strict liability regimes for LLM-generated content and weakened fair use protections as the most dangerous regulatory exports threatening American AI competitiveness and free expression online.
• •Viewpoint-Neutral Regulation as the Standard: Rogers distinguishes between viewpoint-based censorship and legitimate content moderation. Founders should build tools that let users filter spam, pornography, or foreign-origin content — distinctions courts recognize as non-viewpoint-based — while regulators should ensure enforcement mechanisms cannot be selectively weaponized against specific political perspectives or industries.
• •Censorship Circumvention Over Upstream Gatekeeping: Rogers redirected the State Department's Digital Freedom Office away from funding NGOs that determined permissible online content toward supporting censorship circumvention tools like VPNs and transparent crowd-sourced moderation systems like X's Community Notes, which place information-filtering power directly with users rather than opaque institutional intermediaries.
• •Government Standing Up for Companies Abroad: When the EU threatened X with regulatory penalties before a Trump interview even aired, Rogers argues the U.S. government must respond with sanctions and diplomatic pressure — analogous to how France would defend Le Monde from equivalent U.S. threats — because silence signals that targeting American platforms for political speech is acceptable.